Many churches built in the 19th century and dedicated to
the Holy Trinity are Evangelical. Why is this? Did any other new
parishes of a different tradition ever use this
dedication?
Holy Trinity, Winchester, 1853, was a definite Anglo-Catholic
parish foundation (and continues in that tradition), one of the
Ecclesiastical Commissoners' churches in a largely artisan
neighbourhood. Another was Holy Trinity, Queen Square, Bath, now
closed, as the congregation could not afford £40,000 repair
costs.
The Church of the Most Holy Trinity, Reading, of course,
acquired a reputation under an eccentric and flamboyant incumbent,
the late Brian Brindley.
(The Revd) Paul A. Newman
Winchester
Francis Bond, in Dedications and Patron Saints of English
Churches (Oxford University Press, 1914) wrote: "Under this
heading [Holy Trinity] are found 297 ancient dedications.
Comparatively few churches were dedicated to the Holy Trinity or
the Sacred Trinity before the closing years of the twelfth century.
But S. Thomas of Canterbury had been consecrated Archbishop in 1170
on the first Sunday after Whitsuntide; he had celebrated his first
mass in Prior Conrad's Trinity chapel, which was to be burnt down
four years later; and it was to this Trinity chapel that the
archbishop constantly resorted for private prayer.
"The Church of Rome had refused to institute a separate festival
to the Holy Trinity, but Becket ordained that all churches in his
province should henceforth observe the first Sunday after
Whitsuntide as Trinity Sunday. . . The great English martyr . . .
was closely connected in the popular mind with the doctrine of the
Trinity, and the result was naturally a great increase in the
number of dedications of churches to the Holy Trinity.
"At a second period also this dedication was in special favour;
viz., from the time of Henry VIII. to the end of the seventeenth
century; this was due mainly to a reaction against the veneration
of non-Biblical saints and of saints in general. It was Henry VIII.
who introduced the Trinity into the dedications of the cathedrals
of Ely and Winchester and of Trinity College, Cambridge. A third
period is the first half of the nineteenth century, when the
evangelical party in the Church selected this dedication for more
than 230 churches."
Against the charge of superstition, the Anglican divine Richard
Hooker (1554-1600) had mounted an extended defence of retaining
historic church dedications in his Of the Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity (5.13): all churches, he argued
(citing St Augustine), were implicitly dedicated to God, although
often in memory of a saint.
Nevertheless, explicit dedication to the Trinity was a medieval
English tradition that the reaction against the Anglo-Catholic
revival may have made Victorian Evangelical church-builders more
willing to embrace - given Catholics' restoration of a lively sense
of communion with the saints in heaven, together with some of the
practices that had previously accompanied this. Editor
I have heard that there is a parish church
(possibly in the west country?) that retains a pair of red slippers
belonging to an Elizabethan gentleman. He travelled to India and
eventually became part of a maharaja's staff. When he died there, a
large monument was built in his memory. Is there any chance of my
tracing these (mythical?) slippers?
B. P.
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